It is quite certain that the cult of this goddess-mother played a more important part in the world of primitive mankind than the cult of a God the Father, the male deity of a later age. The goddess of love and life under whatever name she may have been known, as Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven, the Mistress of the World, the holy mother _genetrix_ of all living creatures, the _Dea optima maxima_ or Most High Goddess, was practically the same all over the world. We may not be mistaken if we attribute the height of her worship to the age of matriarchy. In prehistoric times the _Magna Dea_ was looked up to with awe and reverence, possibly even with a devotion more ardent than in a later period. The Ancient of Days or Jupiter, i. e., Diespiter, the father of time and light, was symbolized by the all-embracing sky and also by the sun. The Greeks called him Zeus, a name pronounced _dzeus_, connected with the Latin _deus_ and _dies_, and Sanskrit _deva_, the creator and ruler of the world. The _Magna Dea_ was the all-mother, and it is but to be expected that when the social conditions of matriarchy changed into the age of the patriarchs the reverence for an all-mother was superseded by the worship of an all-father. [Illustration: CARRYING IN PROCESSION THE SYMBOL OF ISTAR] The _Magna Dea_ was all in all to mankind. Her emblem as the goddess of vegetation and of the sustenance of life was the apple or pomegranate. As the goddess of the human soul she is represented as a bird like the Egyptian representation of the soul, a human-headed hawk; or as a dove, the symbol which later on represents the gnostic Sophia, the mother of the child-god, and in Christian dogmatology, the Holy Ghost.